Editor's Notebook

All roads lead to Joel Brinkmeyer and Doug Gross. That’s why Tom Cullen trundled up Hwy. 71 on Thursday to Okoboji, in search of the elusive pair who control much of the public policy debate around agriculture and the environment these days. I would have paid money to see them try to ditch him, and then the gangly reporter trudges out to Hole 14 in his clodhoppers to find Brinkmeyer in shorts.

If Cherokee is frustrated with an empty meatpacking plant today, they will be more frustrated by carping about Tyson Foods’ apparent refusal to let go of its lease on the 42 acres just outside the city limits before 2020.

The Des Moines Sunday Register’s lead story last weekend detailed the complaints of city council members, retailers and the owner of the building who lives in New York. Many claim that Tyson is holding Cherokee “hostage” by not allowing direct competitors to occupy the building.

Every blue moon or so the old college roommates — four of us — gather in the Twin Cities to be 20 again. When we were 20 they would not let us near the dugouts, but thanks to Kempf Paper we enjoyed box seats within shouting distance of first-base coach Butch Davis.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and the rest of them are apoplectic that their Republican Party standard bearer, Donald Trump, embraces the anti-immigrant position of its nativist core. Ryan and McConnell must defend congressional seats in the November election, and when Trump goes off on a Mexican-American judge as being a “hater” they see their electoral prospects decline a little more.

Editor’s Note: This column was written for the 150th anniversary of the Algona Upper Des Moines newspaper in Kossuth County. The editor earned his chops as a reporter for the county-seat weekly, where he succeeded Times Publisher John Cullen as UDM editor. Their parents, Pat and Eileen Cullen, were former Algona residents who moved to Storm Lake in 1957.

Back on a sunshiny day like Monday my mother told me not to use the restrooms in Sunset Park, just a stone’s throw from our ancestral home at 216 Geneseo St. A pervert was lurking, she told me. Then she shoved me out the front door to go play in the street or the park or the lake and I went down to Sunset Park and peed in the bushes, behind the band shell, under that cobblestone bridge we recently pictured, everywhere but the restroom. The pervert probably was watching the entire time.

A couple moments in the history of The Storm Lake Times were captured in photos last week. The first was our final press run on our Mighty Harris V15A, which we installed 22 years ago. This is the first edition of The Times printed at White Wolf Web in Sheldon, which has a Mighty Harris that is roughly 40 years newer than ours and four times bigger.